Just in case you hadn't heard, your freshly minted Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, would like you to express yourself.

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She reckons you should have the right to say what you like about asylum seekers – sorry, "unauthorised arrivals" – without being branded either a redneck or a bleeding heart, soft-centred liberal.

Which all sounds great in theory. At least until you go to the footy and hear Aboriginal players referred to from opposing cheer squads as "black ----s", and others of varying ethnicity as "reffo bastards".

Are we really that tolerant as a nation? I'm not sure.

Surely, Julia, you can hear them when you're standing out front of the goals for the Bulldogs? No full forward ever missed the taunts of the hardcore barrackers behind the big sticks.

It's equally fine in theory, too, until you sit around the nation's salons (OK, make that legal precinct wine bars and restaurants that specialise in the $350 a head degustation) and listen to them bang on about what's best for the workers . . . and the people clamouring to get here on unsafe boats.

In her speech last week about border control, Moving Australia Forward, Gillard identified the polar ends of the asylum seeker debate in Australia. She then went on to define them in carefully crafted terms that suit her immediate political requirement. Which is, of course, the re-election of Labor and the public legitimisation of her prime ministership.

On the extreme "evil" right, she placed Tony Abbott, who would turn the boats back, wherever possible, if he could. On the extreme left, meanwhile, she word-sketched a detached (mostly Labor voting) elite that seeks to guillotine the human rights/refugee debate by political correctness.

Specifically, she took a whack at the respected human rights lawyer and refugee advocate Julian Burnside, QC, for allegedly referring to "rednecks in marginal seats" who are concerned about "unauthorised arrivals". Burnside maintains he actually said "that people who say we should turn the boats back at gunpoint are rednecks whose views I can't accept". There is, in fairness, quite a difference.

But then again Gillard seems acutely sensitive to the political potency of the asylum-seeker issue in marginal electorates. This was perfectly illustrated by the appearance of Labor's MP for the western Sydney knife-edge seat of Lindsay, David Bradbury, aboard a patrol boat in Darwin just a day after she made the speech, when the PM was extolling her apparent plan (most charitably described as embryonic) to process all asylum seekers headed for Australia in East Timor.

Excuse me for being passing cynical here, especially as Gillard now, most improbably, says the East Timor proposal – for all its meritorious potential to process asylum seekers quickly and humanely under the auspices of the United Nations – seems little more than a case of prime ministerial thinking aloud.

Her dissembling is damaging this close to an election. She needs to fix the details fast.

Regardless, now that she has defined the parameters of the debate on asylum, she is swimming in a politically perilous rip that runs through the middle of it. Along the way she is identifying – and paying something more than lip service to – the resentments that doubtless simmer in some marginal electorates about asylum seekers.

''That hardworking Australians who themselves are doing it tough want to know that refugees allowed to settle here are not singled out for special treatment," she said. "That people like my parents, who have worked hard all their lives, the thing that they can't abide is the idea that others might get an inside track to special privileges.''

Special privileges? Special treatment? Express yourself, Prime Minister. What are you talking about?

Rudd, famously, was criticised as a captive, not to public opinion – but to public opinion polls. What, some must wonder, has really changed . . . and who is she listening to?

Nonetheless, there seemed scarcely a word out of place in a speech that vindicates, if nothing much else, Gillard's capacity for plain speaking that reaches the voters who will determine the election. While swimming the rip last week, Gillard displayed her profound and enviable capacity to read a complex political situation, spot the orthodoxy and channel it back to the people who matter most.

This was an appeal to neither the left nor right. No, it was a blatant pitch to the place where elections are won and lost – the centre.

While her government scrambles to find an electoral policy fix for what is, in global terms, a minor issue with boat people, she has done her best to grant the public ownership of both the solutions and the perceived problems. Government works best when you can make the punters genuinely feel like passengers.

There is unseemly, uncharacteristically clumsy urgency about Gillard's efforts to tick off a fix for the asylum seeker issue, as evidenced by Bradbury's appearance off Darwin.

Just as there is also a nagging sense that Gillard's leadership – while mostly lending the government clearer direction – is still something of a veneer that hides deeper-seated dilemmas about Labor's essence.

In the Australian Labor Party, just like the British Labour Party, there will always be those who believe government takes an unequal toll on the party's heart and soul. Gillard is not one of them.

What then, to make of John Faulkner, regarded as a conscience of the party's true left, who has quit as defence minister barely a year into the job? It's a bad look on the eve of an election, when he could easily have made the announcement afterwards.

But then again the war in Afghanistan that he has been waging on Australia's behalf is also becoming an increasingly bad look, as more young Australians return home in caskets. Here, then, is a gratuitous prediction for whoever wins the next election: Afghanistan will soon become as polarising an issue as asylum seekers.

Julia Gillard reckons she's all ears. So please, express yourself.

As Charles Wright wrote:

Some people have everything And other people don't But everything don't mean a thing If it ain't the thing you want.